2011
marked the culmination of a decades-spanning career arc as Frank
Santoro found his art at the center of the 2011 Pittsburgh
Biennial at The Carnegie Museum of Art, where he attended studio
art classes as a youth. We are excited to at last be able to
offer for sale copies of Frank Santoro's 16-page tabloid
newspaper comics
work that was the highlight of that exhibit.
In a signature Santoro move, Blast
Furnace Funnies is a work of
"High" (i.e., museum quality) art executed in the lowest of the "Low"
art forms (a disposable
newspaper); employing ephemerality to evoke
eternity, he has here worked (in a form that often ends up) in the
gutter to
reach for the stars. The
originals for all 16 pages of Blast
Furnace Funnies wereexhibited
at
The Carnegie alongside of a giant stack of the newspapers we're
offering here, and they
really stood out on the walls for the wide tonal range displayed on
each page; from wispy grays to solid blacks, from strong straight lines
to streaks, curves, scribbles and blurs, each page contained marks made
to match the mood. The color scheme of the newspaper itself is a
duo-tone of
varying saturations, consisting of yellow and magenta, that yields a
surprising variety of hues, suggested and actual. The message thatBlast Furnace Funnies has to
deliver is a meditation on the relationship between the here and now
and the past and gone that is, critically, played
out in parallel on the scales
of the
personal and the historical.
The narrative works to convey how we use our sense of the historical to
understand our own lives – and even more, to suggest that, at the end
of the day, all we really have are our own personal histories; that
perhaps the ultimate function of the history that we learn from books
and at school is to help us come to grips with existence. We
all live in a relentless forward motion, each moment is
here and then it is gone, replaced by the next and never to be
physically experienced again. The memory of each moment is,
however, in the context of an individual's own life – and,
like "historical" events – always
there. The
personal is the historical. Memory is history. Pittsburgh
is Pompeii.